Remote Principal Engineer – Cloud Networking & Scale

IBM Computing; Seattle (WA); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Principal Engineer to join the Traffic team responsible for building and managing the networking fabric of Confluent Cloud. This role focuses on large-scale distributed systems across AWS, Azure, and GCP, enabling customer and internal connectivity.

You will architect, design, and deliver high-performance systems, lead a team of engineers, collaborate with product and cloud providers, and contribute to open source while optimizing for scale, cost, and reliability.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of cloud infrastructure/cloud networking experience.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development.
• Experience driving vision and technical roadmap as an architect in a large sized platforms or infrastructure team.
• Experience building and operating large-scale systems.
• Experience leading a team of engineers and working cross-team to deliver complex infrastructure projects.
• Solid understanding of basic systems operations (storage, network, operating systems, etc.).
• Proficiency in C++, Go, Python, or other statically typed languages.
• Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience building and managing Layer 7 proxies, especially cloud-native proxies such as Envoy.

Responsibilities

• Build the software underpinning the mission-critical Confluent Cloud network data plane platform.
• Deliver high impact to the business by driving important technical initiatives in networking, cloud infrastructure, and multi-tenancy.
• Independently drive architecture, roadmap, execution of software projects and technically lead a team of engineers to deliver impact in production with a focus on quality.
• Engage with product and cloud providers to innovate and solve business problems using technical input.
• Build upon open source software and engage with the upstream community to deliver business impact.
• Troubleshoot issues and improve ops for complex technical stack spanning three clouds, microservices, containers, and virtualization.

Skills

Distributed systems

Architectural leadership

Team leadership

Cross-team collaboration

Statically typed languages

Public clouds (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Education

Bachelor's Degree

Master's Degree

Tools

Envoy Proxy

Kubernetes Networking

Job description

IBM Software is seeking a Principal Engineer to join the Traffic team responsible for building and managing the networking fabric of Confluent Cloud. This role focuses on large-scale distributed systems across AWS, Azure, and GCP, enabling customer and internal connectivity.

You will architect, design, and deliver high-performance systems, lead a team of engineers, collaborate with product and cloud providers, and contribute to open source while optimizing for scale, cost, and reliability.